It felt a little bit like Frankenstein, you know, we were wondering what to do. “The animations and the model were in, and we’d been working on the AI and desires – and we got the creature to come alive. “I can still remember working late one night with Richard Evans, not entirely sober, when we first got the creature to wake up,” says Molyneux.

At the time, B&W was the most hotly anticipated game in the world – think No Man’s Sky – but a small team and the pioneering nature of the work led to a series of delays. The game also featured an adaptive AI “creature”, which would learn from and reflect the player’s actions. This loosely conceived ambition became Black & White, an open-world strategy adventure in which the player became a god controlling a society of primitive villagers. The idea was to search for a “crazily inventive” game concept and a small team of 30-35 people who could build it. Indeed, I said I’ll fund it, thinking that at that time it would be maybe be a couple of hundred thousand but actually it was a lot more in the end. So while at Bullfrog, Mark Webley, Steve Jackson, Paul McLaughlin and myself met in a pub, and decided to start up Lionhead. “And any feeling of culture and inventiveness was diluted by that. “When EA acquired Bullfrog there were, like, 35 people, and within nine months there were 200,” says Molyneux. Usually, one of the two doesn’t make it out alive. That publisher’s subsequent mishandling of the studio, which would flounder and then close six years later, is a foundation myth of the games industry a stark cautionary tale on what can happen when big money meets creative genius. There, he oversaw a string of classic sim titles – Populous, Powermonger, Syndicate, Theme Park – before selling up to Electronic Arts in 1995. Lionhead made games with big choices, and it was ended by a cruel one.įor much of its history, the studio was synonymous with Peter Molyneux, the idiosyncratic game designer who co-founded seminal Guildford studio Bullfrog in the 1990s. Another decade later, on 31 April 2016, the lights were turned off for the final time. Formed in Guildford in 1996, the studio was independent for a decade before Microsoft acquired it. In a medium where big budgets tend to shrink ambitions, here was a group of experimenters, inventors, and craftspeople who always produced something curious, whether that was creative oddity The Movies or the hugely successful Fable series. F or almost 20 years, Lionhead Studios was a beacon of the UK games industry.

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